Author’s note: Those characters that aren’t owned by
The Almighty Mouse belong to Christine Morgan, not me. This vignette takes
place in her fic-verse’s timeline, at nearly the same time as the events
of “Just Visiting.”

“For me, I’m here because o’ my brothers. One’s in a maximum-security
physical rehabilitation ward, an’ may never be fit enough t’ live on his
own even when his sentence is up…” –Hunter (Robyn Canmore), Bad Girls
Ch.1___________________________________

April 19, 2004

The midmorning sun shone through the barred windows, of
the hospital wing at Ryker’s Island Correctional Institute.
A uniformed guard walked laconically through the halls until he came to
the maximum security ward, and looked through the reinforced-windowed door
of the semiprivate room in which resided Jon Castaway, former leader of
the Quarrymen. “Castaway! Got a visitor today.”

Looking up from his hospital bed, where he had been listlessly
turning the pages of a six-month-old Newsweek magazine, Castaway was honestly
surprised. “A visitor?” It wasn’t Saturday, the day that Margot
Yale usually visited with his son Bryce. Perhaps it was his sister
Robyn; he hadn’t seen her in far too long, though she sent letters regularly.
Those letters were usually maddeningly vague when it came to her present
activities, only hinting of what she was doing while working for the Coalition.

As he sat painfully down in the wheelchair, to be strapped
in by the guard before wheeling him away to the visiting room, he thought
about his sister and her secretive employers. The Coalition, the
organization that provided Margot and Bryce with a secure place to live
and paid for his experimental peritonitis treatment; FDA-unapproved drug
therapies and unconventional medical procedures that left him weak, constantly
in pain and barely able to stand on most days, but were the only thing
keeping him alive, over two years after conventional medicine had given
him less than two weeks to live.

After the Demon’s offspring had attacked and gutted him
at the last Quarryman rally, seven hours of emergency surgery had pieced
together most of the bloody jigsaw the monster had made of his insides.
But it had also left him with raging peritonitis, a recurring infection
that overwhelmed his immune system and sneered at conventional antibiotics,
and at all the efforts of the state-paid doctors over the next four months
of ultimately futile treatments. If those gentlemen from the Coalition
hadn’t arrived four months after the attack, and brought along a sheaf
of official documents declaring him to be a volunteer for medical research
along with doctors to begin new a new regimen of treatment, he would almost
certainly be moldering in a coffin by now.

Jon worried, sometimes, about what sort of work Robyn
was doing for this mysterious organization in exchange for his survival
and his son’s well-being; he was sure it was ‘covert operations’, the sort
of work that their family excelled in after a thousand years of quietly
hunting the Demon. No doubt most of her work was quasi-legal at best,
and very likely not even ethical, but in the first letter she’d sent him,
quietly handed over by the first Coalition operative in an unobserved moment,
she’d written to him that she’d do whatever she had to in order to look
after what was left of their family.

As the guard wheeled him through the halls to the visiting
room, he asked casually, “Did you happen to see my visitor before coming
to get me?” The guard replied laconically that he had, and the man’s
name was Joseph Clemens; he was described as being a redheaded man of average
height and weight and estimated to be in his mid-twenties.
Castaway blinked in surprise at the male designation; definitely not his
sister, then. But if not her, then who could it be? The
eagerness to see his sister vanished, to be replaced by dawning hope and
excitement: could it be that his lately painstakingly indirect efforts
to obtain his lifelong goal were about to pay off at last?

With his simultaneous arrest and hospitalization, and
the arrest of over three dozen of his best fighters after their attack
on the Labyrinth, the Quarrymen had been virtually disbanded. In
the three years since that awful night, he had spent most of it languishing
here in this ward, his life enlivened only by the visits from Margot and
his son, his body racked by pain and his soul by remorse. Remorse
not for what he’d done in hunting the gargoyles and forming the Quarrymen,
but for what he hadn’t done; utterly destroyed them all, and nearly
all their traitor-to-Humanity allies with them, at the first opportunity!

Why hadn’t he made good use of the contacts and
the fortune his family had built up over the generations of arming themselves
and hunting the Demon all over the world, and achieved the means to utterly
destroy the clan in one fell blow, and their castle with them?! All
it would have taken was one small but sturdy plane flying high overhead,
and a bomb with a warhead big enough that even premature detonation would
cause a concussive air burst strong enough to flatten the castle below.
And the same and simultaneous treatment for the Nightstone building, of
course…

Of course there would have been some collateral damage
to the city, and probably a few innocent bystanders would have become casualties
of war. But it would have been worth it; he’d have happily gone to jail,
and even to the electric chair with a smile, if it had finished off all
the gargoyles in the city. And if the family’s weapons contacts around
the world couldn’t supply suitable bombs… just one airplane for the castle
and one delivery truck for Nightstone; both packed with fertilizer and
gasoline, and kamikazes at the controls!

Harry the Hammer would have done nicely for a kamikaze
driver… Or would have, back then. But now, since Devil’s Night, he
was out on the streets proclaiming to all the world that the gargoyles
were saviors! That they had saved the city from Hell itself
that night, and they should be praised instead of hunted, even worshipped
instead of shattered in their sleep! Jon had always known that Harry
was one of his less stable personnel, but he’d never dreamed that the man
would go that far around the bend.

He had learned from his sister that the Demon herself
was apparently dead now, as well as that offspring of hers who had gutted
him, dead after Devil’s Night; the Demon had been taken straight into Hell
by their brother Jason, in a heroic sacrifice of his own life and soul.
But too many other gargoyles still lived and breathed, and now were even
obscenely being hailed as heroes by most of the abysmally ignorant
general public! Having come to the conclusion that truly extreme
measures were now necessary in order to kill them all, he had attempted
to coordinate those measures even while still hospitalized and incarcerated.
After all, he’d reasoned, if scum like Tony Dracon could secretly run his
criminal organization for over a year while ostensibly in a jail cell,
the last scion of the Hunters could certainly do no less.

But he encountered stumbling block after stumbling block
in renewing his crusade against the gargoyles. The Anvil Corporation
he’d founded with money from the family coffers had its assets seized after
his arrest, in a massive lawsuit on behalf of the innocent bystanders who
had become victims in the attack on the Labyrinth. All of his corporate
investors had withdrawn their funding as well, either directly after the
Labyrinth fiasco or in the citywide havoc following Devil’s Night.
The discreet French armorer that had outfitted the three Canmore siblings
with weapons and equipment when they’d taken up their father’s cause, and
created the Quarryhammers and other equipment for Jon Castaway later on,
had died of an utterly mundane heart attack. The heir to the armorer’s
fortune and weapons manufacturing complex had, unbelievably, promptly donated
all his assets to the poor and became a Buddhist monk!

He’d finally managed to contact the family’s Middle East
acquaintances by means of a series of carefully worded letters… Only to
be rudely informed by return letter that he was an utter madman to even
consider asking for the help of such an upstanding and honorable family
in committing an act of terrorism against anyone, let alone such a well-known
philanthropist, and further letters would be forwarded unopened to the
American consulate. He knew well that if he had been able to fly
there, talk to them directly and produce enough money up front, he no doubt
would have gotten everything he required and more… but they were not about
to supply a well-trained terrorist team and the right equipment to a penniless
man in prison, who might possibly be drawing them into a trap for the U.S.
government in order to reduce his sentence.

He’d even tried to contact the Coalition, his sister’s
employers, and seek out their aid; he strongly suspected, from tidbits
he’d gleaned from his sister’s letters, that they were no friends to David
Xanatos. But even after finally achieving a visit from another Coalition
operative—who had turned out to be the mercenary Inge Runolf, to his somewhat
mild surprise—his case and plea for support had been coldly sneered at,
as the ravings of a madman obsessed with revenge. The look
of icy contempt in Runolf’s eyes as she’d informed him that the Coalition
was doing enough for him already had made him want to rise out of his wheelchair
and throttle her, propelled by pure fury and strength of will… but he dared
not.

Not when he knew that the Coalition was all that was keeping
his son safely with Margot, and not in the custody of that silly brood
mare he’d sired Bryce on. Her abhorrent family had almost won him
away after his arrest, and Margot had barely been able to keep a step ahead
of them before the Coalition had stepped in. Once they had, the threatening
letters and blustering lawyers on behalf of the Nebraskan family had abruptly
stopped coming, as if they had never existed; he’d never found out exactly
what had been done, to silence them so thoroughly. No, so long
as his son was safe with Margot and his treatments were continuing, he
had to pretend to be satisfied with that and let his crusade on behalf
of Humanity languish in bitter silence. But now, an unexpected visitor…

Upon arriving in the visiting room, he eyed the man waiting
expectantly on the other side of the thick glass. This Joseph Clemens
seemed vaguely familiar, but from where? Then, as he picked up the
telephone that connected the two booths for sound, it hit him; not Joseph
Clemens at all, but Joseph Carstairs, one of his former Quarrymen lieutenants.

Joe Carstairs had been loyal to the cause, nearly as much
so as Harry Hammerton had been before Devil’s Night; Jon suspected that
it was partly because a gargoyle had had something to do with Joe spending
six months behind bars for attempted robbery before he’d joined the Quarrymen’s
ranks. Carstairs had been one of the thirty-eight Quarrymen arrested
following the Labyrinth fiasco; apparently, he was now out on parole.
And going under the name of Clemens for this visit, with his usual blonde
hair under a redhead wig, because being caught visiting another convict
would put him in violation of his parole, and back into a cell.

Joe smiled at him and said into the phone, “Hello, cousin!
Remember me? Joe Clemens, second cousin on your mother’s side; we haven’t
seen each other since the last family reunion. Surprised to see me
now, aren’t you? I’m in New York on a business deal, and our Aunt
Annie would never let me live it down if I didn’t stop in to see every
relative in a three-state radius.”

“Good old Aunt Annie,” Jon responded, smiling broadly.
Annabelle Mortenson had been his secretary at Anvil Corporation, and had
sometimes been referred to as ‘Aunt Annie’ by the younger members of the
Quarrymen in the rare affectionate moments. “So, how’s the rest of the
family?”

“Oh, scattered here and there,” Joe said with an offhand
shrug. “But some of us have been talking about having another family
reunion, sometime soon.”

Hope blossomed joyously in Jon’s soul, though he kept
his face in an expression of only mild interest. “That’d be nice;
our family should get together more often. Wish I could be there…”

“I’ll be happy to pass on your regards,” Joe offered with
a mildly rueful expression.

No plans to break him out of prison, then. Considering
his currently precarious condition of health, that was really to be expected.
But Joe could relay coded messages for him to the other Quarrymen; that
was better than nothing. Jon nodded, then said after a short pause,
“Do you have enough budgeted for a big reunion party?”

“Well, we ain’t got much, maybe enough to rent a campground,”
Joe admitted ruefully. Meaning, the Quarrymen had a meeting place,
but no money in the coffers to mount a serious offensive against the gargoyles…
yet. “The kids will want to go someplace where they can play with
their toys, and with pony rides nearby, like we used to go on at reunions;
can you recommend a good site?”

‘Pony rides’ had to mean the Quarryvans, hover-cycles
and jetpacks that he’d outfitted the Quarrymen with… and the Quarryhammers
had always been their favorite toys. Joe was asking if he had a secret
stash of weapons and equipment, that hadn’t been seized after his arrest
and the collapse of Anvil Corporation. “I might be able to
think of a place, if you’ll give me a while to think,” Jon said, then looked
significantly down at his folded hands for a brief moment. Then,
looking back up again, he began nonchalantly tapping one finger against
the other hand.

With taps and pauses, while keeping up an innocuous spiel
about his son Bryce’s progress in kindergarten, he gave the numerical values
for the street numbers of an intersection, close to the docks on the Eastern
side. The location of a warehouse that had been left untouched all
these years, as far as he knew, and should still contain a stockpile of
weapons and transportation equipment for the Quarrymen’s use. “That’s
pretty much it… for right now,” he concluded after he’d finished tapping.

Joe nodded sharply once, to show he understood, then relaxed
and smiled. “So, how are you yourself doing lately?”

Jon smiled broadly again and said sincerely, “Today, I’m
feeling better than I have in a long time…”